BY JOHN SANFORD

Yvor Winters, an English professor who died more than three decades ago, came alive again on a recent evening in Annenberg Auditorium, where some of his former students shared memories of their famously disciplined teacher during a poetry reading held in his honor.

Listening to the introduction at the Yvor Winters Centenary celebration were poets Thom Gunn, Dana Gioia and Helen Pinkerton. Photo: L.A. Cicero

The Nov. 16 reading was the first event of the three-day Yvor Winters Centenary Symposium presented by the Humanities Center. Stanford University Libraries, the Department of English and the Program in Creative Writing were co-sponsors.

In conjunction with the symposium, an exhibit of materials drawn from papers of Winters and his wife Janet Lewis, as well as from private collections, will be on display through Dec. 3 in the Bing Wing of Stanford's Cecil H. Green Library. "Points on the Winters Circle," the four-case exhibit, features manuscripts, drawings and photographs. The curator was Helen Pinkerton, a retired Stanford lecturer and former student of Winters.

Winters has been described as a hard-edged and often iconoclastic critic of literature. As a poet, he was a formalist, and the intellectually refined emotion in his poems makes them sharp and clear as a cold day.

In his poem "To a Young Writer," he advises:

Write little; do it well.

Your knowledge will be

such,

At last, as to dispel

What moves you over-

much.

Indeed, one of his most notable legacies may be as a teacher of poets.

"His role in American literature is as a poet and a critic who had an incredibly strong formative influence on other writers," said the poet Dana Gioia, who chaired the poetry reading. "I would argue that Winters is probably the most influential teacher of poetry writing in the history of American letters."

Gioia, who studied as an undergraduate at Stanford and earned his master's degree in business administration here in 1977, is author of Can Poetry Matter? and two books of poetry. And while he never had Winters as a teacher, he produced a long list of some of those who had, including the poets Howard Baker, Turner Cassity, Philip Levine, Donald Justice, Ann Hayes, Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall, Thom Gunn and Pinkerton.

A few of those on the list were on hand to read selections of Winters' poetry, as well as their own.

"I spent one year with Yvor Winters working here," said Donald Hall, a poet and free-lance writer. "And it will come as a surprise to nobody in this room if I say next that I learned more about poetry from Yvor Winters in that one year than I ever learned from anybody else throughout my education."

An admirer of William Butler Yeats, Hall recalled how Winters would dismantle the Irish poet's work until there were "heaps on the floor."

Hall said he often didn't agree with Winters' views on poetry but never won an argument with him during that year.

"He was a magnificent arguer," Hall said. "And you learn a lot by being beaten by a master."

Thom Gunn, who also studied under Winters at Stanford, remembered two of Winters' common refrains: "I'd rather die than re-read the last novels of Henry James" and "We must never lie, or we shall lose our souls."

Gunn also recalled the sound of the professor's voice: "The tears held back --­ barely held back --­ his voice would frequently almost break when he was reading the poems that he loved."

Arthur Yvor Winters was born Oct. 17, 1900, in Chicago. He studied at the University of Chica-go and taught French and Spanish at the University of Idaho before coming to Stanford in 1927 as a graduate student, earning his Ph.D. in 1934. He began teaching English at Stanford in 1928 and continued to teach here until his retirement in 1965. Winters was named the Albert Guerard Professor of Literature in 1961.

He published several critical books, including Primitivism and Decadence (1937), Maule's Curse (1938), The Anatomy of Nonsense (1943), In Defense of Reason (1956) and The Function of Criticism (1957). He won Yale's 1960 Bollingen Prize for his Collected Poems. In 1967, he received $10,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Winters was a lifetime member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and he was honorary chairman of the 1957 membership campaign for the Palo Alto-Stanford NAACP.

Winters also was well known among dog aficionados as a breeder of Airedale terriers.

As a scholar, he had a well-known reputation for being an unforgiving critic. But what many of his peers considered harsh and dogmatic criticism of literature, others saw as incisive.

"He was always completely serious about the writing of poetry and the criticism of it," Pinkerton said.

Winters wrote that, as an editor for the literary periodical Hound and Horn, "I laid the foundation for more literary enmities and for enmities more intense, enduring and I think I may fairly say unscrupulous, than I should judge have been enjoyed by any writer of my generation. It was all quite unintentional on my part; I merely took literature seriously, and sought to achieve a precise style in my critical articles."

According to Gioia, Winters' writing is gaining in prominence.

"When a well-known writer dies, there is usually a brief flurry of memorial events and celebrations, and then a long, slow and usually irreversible decline in readership and reputation," he said. "However powerfully their work may have spoken to their contemporaries, posterity tends to be a merciless editor. Yvor Winters died 32 years ago, and now in the year 2000, at his centenary, we can be confident that not only has he survived as a poet and a critic, but his reputation continues to grow."

The Nov. 16 reading was the first event of the three-day Yvor Winters Centenary Symposium presented by the Humanities Center. Stanford University Libraries, the Department of English and the Program in Creative Writing were co-sponsors.